A game to make you wonder what the hell is going on at Manchester City

Imagine Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta back in 2019, just before Arteta left his position as Guardiola’s assistant at Manchester City to become the manager at Arsenal. Imagine you had sat them down, told them they were about to see the football of the future, and then showed them the tape of this game.

What would Guardiola have thought about the team in sky blue, this collection of enormous men nearly 6½ feet tall, high-fiving each other as they scrambled the ball away for corners, lashing long clearances up the line, unable to string five passes together, their coach desperately sending on more defenders the better to allow the team withdraw into its defensive shell?

What would Arteta have thought of the team in red, whose staff had placed little towels next to the ball stations so their full-backs could dry off the ball before they hurled the latest in a series of pointless long throws into the penalty area?

You have to imagine they would be shocked and unnerved by the spectacle. Is this game really from the future, they would ask. What happened? Is the country at war? Neither of these teams are even trying to play what we would call football. Is this ... all that is left of our legacy?

But here we are, life takes you on strange journeys. Mikel Arteta’s long road to Pulisville has been well documented, but this was a game to make you wonder what the hell is going on at Manchester City.

City’s performance was dominated by the two giants at either end: Gianluigi Donnarumma in goal and the phenomenal Erling Haaland up front.

Donnarumma’s arrival at City at the end of the transfer window was a surprise, given that they had signed James Trafford for £31 million just a few weeks earlier.

Donnarumma had been let go by PSG because Luis Enrique felt his play with the ball at his feet wasn’t up to standard – so what would a Pep team want with him? The signing looked like the club seeing the opportunity to sign a big star at a low price, and lumbering Guardiola with a new goalkeeper he didn’t really want.

“What does he give you that you didn’t already have?” a journalist asked Guardiola after Donnarumma signed. “He’s so tall. He’s so huge,” Guardiola replied, with a smirk. It seemed a bit pointed, especially since Donnarumma is one centimetre shorter than Trafford.

But at the Emirates, under the barrage of 11 Arsenal inswinging corners, Donnarumma was in his element – rising to swipe away ball after ball, single-handedly thwarting Arsenal’s plan A.

The other component of Arsenal’s Plan A is not to concede, but Haaland soon scuppered that. There are a few other players in world football who could score the goal he scored after nine minutes, but none who would look quite so spectacular while doing it.

The way he stormed clear of three Arsenal defenders and finished with deadly accuracy at full speed was pure uncut Haaland. We haven’t seen Haaland of this purity often enough in the City years, when he has often seemed constrained by Guardiola’s system, patrolling his little central zone like a frustrated zoo animal.

Now that the system itself is disintegrating around him, Haaland might get more chances to run riot, as God intended. Because on the evidence of this game, the City system really is disintegrating.

For eight years under Guardiola City were a team that got the ball and kept it, usually in the opposing half. When they lost it they swarmed the opposition to get it back.

Now we had City defending their six-yard box like Inter against Barcelona back in 2010, desperately embracing what Guardiola has on countless occasions derided as anti-football. A lot of Pep’s contemporaries watching around the world will have enjoyed that second half. When you don’t have the players to play in the other team’s half, this is what you have to do.

When Haaland had to go off 15 minutes from the end – according to Guardiola, at the player’s own request – even Arteta no longer feared City could score a second goal. The only question was whether Arsenal could force the issue.

In the end the injury-time equaliser came in a strange way. City, not yet a true anti-football team, lost the ball high up the pitch – and then stayed high rather than dropping off to defend their lead.

It was a good pass by Eberechi Eze over the top and a great finish by Gabriel Martinelli to lob Donnarumma, but from City’s point of view the goal was a shocker. Defensive line pushing up 45 yards from goal, with absolutely no pressure on the opposing player in possession? We’ve seen this before and it has a name: Angeball.

City finished the game with 33 per cent possession, their worst figure in nine years under Guardiola. The coach praised their resilience, but City were clearly far off the level of their last title-winning team.

A pity that Arsenal set up to play against that dominant team, instead of the City that actually turned up. Just as he had at Anfield, Arteta left Eze on the bench in order to fit a third physical midfielder in Mikel Merino alongside Declan Rice and Zubimendi.

It hadn’t worked at Anfield so why did Arteta think it would work here, when there was more pressure on Arsenal to win? City, like Liverpool, were relieved not to have to play against the guy who scored the winner against them in the FA Cup final.

Arteta eventually introduced Eze at half-time and Arsenal proceeded to threaten City’s goal more in the first five minutes of the second half than in the entirety of the first. But their second-half domination was too little too late. A five-point gap to the top after five games is worrying for Arsenal, but more worrying is that their coach is not learning from his mistakes.

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